Probably within a few months I will have a perm. donation page up with more options than paypal. I just wanted to get this message on the frontpage through the summer as I work on the site.

I don't want want to sound fundraising happy, because we just came off the heels of the modem fundraising But at the sametime, if I can just cover the costs of all of the equipment and monthly charges so the station is self-sufficient. I am going to have a break-down to show how much it costs to run the station, etc.

Really, this fundraising effort is directed towards new people and people that have not donated. I really don't want people that have already donated to give again. I am very much appreciative of their generosity! There are plenty of people that listen that if they gave even a $1, we would be all set for 5 years!

And this more permanent donation campaign is to protect the station in the event of any changes on my end. Such as changing careers (myself) to an occupation that might result in a pay-cut or something like that - this could negatively effect the station.

Although, my long term plans are to steadily introduce new features and services and come up with some business model to make the station pay for itself - but that is a long way off and there are very few stations - all but the largest ones - that even turn a profit. Until them I am very committed to continuing this situation and making it the best of its kind!

You might notice that some parts of our website are loading faster and responding quicker. This is directly related to listener donations!

With our current donations paying for the $55 dollar a month bill for streaming services, we were able to afford to purchase a $9.95 professional hosting account with 400 megs of storage and 20 GB of bandwidth per month. This will compliment our current hosting services which are served on a relatively slow DSL line. The problem is when 7+ people are trying to access the site at one time, things move to a crawl and get hung up at our ISP which limits the available bandwidth to 384 kps.

We have moved 90% of all the graphic files to the new host - which accounts for the improved speed. We hope to move parts of our site to the new commercial grade server, but still keep some services on our own "home made" CelticRadio server.

So, thanks again for all of the donations! We hope to receive enough donations (included in our original goal) to be able to buy 1 years worth of hosting services at a discounted price of $99 for the year.

I just wanted to thank all of the people that have donated and to everyone that contributes to this forum because having a nice community of listeners available to chat here is just as important and keeps things interesting.

Here is an update on donation efforts and how we are using these funds to support our site and broadcast.

I have to tally up the totals, but we must be nearing atleast $1,000 which is unbelievable! That would bring us to a little over 1/3 of our goal.

As of right now the streaming services are being totally paid for by these donations - along with a generous donation of bandwidth! We also have to think about the bandwidth, because without that bandwidth donation are streaming cost would be 3-4 time more to support our current listener base.

Donations are also paying for a commercial hosting package ($9.95 per month) at tera-byte.com that offloads the majority of our heavy duty graphics and large files. Without offloading all of the heavy duty graphics & files, our website would slow to a crawl.

Finally, we were able to upgrade our lowly webserver's 600 mhz cyrix processor to a Pentium III 1.2 ghz processor. This had a huge impact on the load time of our frontpage and also the forum. It will allow more than just a handful of people to connect at one time and should provide many years of service to the website. Of course, we will find a job for the 600 mhz cpu at some point in the future. Perhaps a separate computer system running just our databases to distribute the load and increase system response time.

Again, our biggest concern is providing enough listener bandwidth so that we do not run out of listener slots. This can get very expensive very fast and our current donation rate would have trouble keeping up with a $200 a month bill (without bandwidth donations). That is where our forth-coming estore and t-shirt sales will come in to play.

We also can accept donations of bandwidth in case anyone has access to a large computer network with bandwidth to spare. Donations in this form would be to offload our graphics to the donors site or to run a shoutcast server to increase our listener count.

Well, thats it for the update. I wanted to give you all a feeling of the difference your donations are making. We will continue to build and expand this site, so as long as interest continues in CelticRadio.net